Approaching Process in Walking through an Aperture for Individuals with Stroke

Abstract

Muroi et al. show that individuals with stroke have improved collision avoidance behavior when passing through an aperture while entering from the paretic-side of the body. However, the underlying mechanism remains unknown. We reanalyzed Muroi et al.’s data to reveal how individuals with stroke walk through an aperture by examining changes in walking velocity and behavioral complexity (i.e., sample entropy, an index of (ir)regularity of time series, regarded lower entropy as more regular and less complex) by focusing on the approaching process. The results showed that individuals with stroke reduced their walking velocity and behavioral complexity before passing through the narrow aperture when approaching from the paretic side. We interpreted that the improved obstacle avoidance when penetrating from the paretic side may be due to careful body rotation and adjusting the walking velocity in advance.

Keywords:

• Stroke
• walking through apertures
• obstacle avoidance
• walking velocity
• sample entropy
• adaptive locomotion

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Editage (www.editage.com) for English language editing.

Ethics Approval

Testing was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Kameda Medical Center (approval number: 16–160).

Consent to Participate

All participants provided written informed consent for participation in this study. The study protocol followed the tenets of the Declaration of Helsinki.

Consent for Publication

All participants provided informed consent for the publication of this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data Availability statement

The datasets used and/or analyzed in the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Notes

1 Two seconds was chosen based on the advice of a previous study (Yentes et al. 2013), and 1m was chosen based on another previous study (Lucaites et al. 2020).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science [KAKENHI Grant Number: 19K19845 (Daisuke Muroi)]. The funding source had no role in the study design, data collection, analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.